Silverlight 4.0 was the big hit at Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference (PDC) this week. "I can see that Silverlight is the future of Windows client development" one attendee told me.
The basis for this enthusiasm is an array of new features that resolve many of the frustrations discovered by developers working with the …

COMMENTS

Is this such a bad thing?

If developers are targetting a line of business app inside their enterprise they probably know what the mix of desktops are... and can decide to use OLE automation of they want (after all, there are some cases where they may need that and as AIR doesn't offer it then it's the only way to give them the option short of writing a native app)

In the interwebs developers can choose to expose scenarios requiring OLE automation if a user is running Windows in just the same way they offer different browsing experiences today.

The browser differences... while it would have been really cool to see Silverlight include the IE9 rendering engine on Mac and PC or maybe host Webkit I think using the local experience is great - it minimises the runtime download, it offers a familiar experience and really how much difference is there between Safari and IE8 rendering? I agree that the missing ability to host HTML in Silverlight inside a browser is a loss... but I suspect they are worried about recursive nesting sucking the entire Internet into a single Silverlight object on a web page and then where would we be!

Linux, for all it's squeaky wheel protestors, is still a server OS. how many typical users are running it today as their primary client (remember ... if you're reading the Reg you're not the majority of the audience) - and anyway... Penguin fanciers made an informed decision so they can't really claim shock and surprise if an app doesn't run there... heck, Photoshop doesn't either but where's the Adobe vitriol! Anyway... if they're as smart as they claim to by... why not help Miguel finish Moonlight then they can have their Silverlight cake with Open Sauce.

Nice to see El Reg covering PDC but not sure I get the negative spin on everything... this story, the one about Be A Martian (http://BeAMartian.jpl.nasa.gov) etc make me suspect some News of the World bias is creeping in....

Now? Hidden?

Silverlight != cross platform

How can Microsoft have any interest in true cross-platform functionality? While it was critical to tout Silverlight as cross-platform in order to attract developer interest, it's hard to imagine that the actual implementation won't be massively preferential to Windows. It seems to me that it's in Microsoft's interest -- and undoubtedly part of their strategy -- to make Silverlight work as poorly as possible on OSX and Linux.

I'll bet I'm not the first

> Since cross-platform Mac and Windows is a key Silverlight feature, it is curious that Microsoft has now decided to make it platform-specific in such an important respect.

No, it was utterly predictable. EEE is ingrained they can't even stop their themselves with their own cross-platform products. Every MS product from Kerberos, to Word/Office, to IE is built to be slightly incompatible, to ensure it doesn't quite work properly or as expected without some other MS product being used either underneath or as a backend. Once you start using their software it is extremely difficult to disentangle yourself.

This is the point that Adobe chuckle to themselves and the Moonlight people's gullibility comes home to them.

Wow

I'm Shocked

Drilling Holes To Let Out The Seawater

Microsoft has worked feverishly to turn WIndows 7 into a secure, world-class operating system worthy of resepect. But how can you expect to plug all the leaks in a boat, when you have the Silverlight people drilling more holes in the bottom? This I'm-ok-you're-ok-let's-share-everything-with-everybody philosophy is the reason Windows suffers so many security problems. It needs to be far more paranoid than it is. COM and direct file system access from the browser? Are these guys *serious*? I run a browser in its own Virtual Machine that always starts with a clean snapshot, completely sandboxed and cut-off from anything I consider valuable. The Internet is a dangerous place, and needs to be treated with the appropriate caution and -- yes, I'll repeat myself -- paranoia. Doing otherwise is like a half-naked woman standing on a street corner in the wrong part of town at 3am waving wads of cash in the air. It's not a question of "if", it's a question of "when". Silverlight is not a solution, it's the beginning of a new round of problems.

And so it begins...

"Brian Goldfarb, director of product marketing, defended this decision. "[Mac and Windows Silverlight] are on a par in every other respect. It's important to give developers choice. We also want to have the option to light up the platform," he said."

Shock horror, MS make their proprietary bollocks better for the Windows client only, and so the colossal FAIL that everyone predicted from the very start begins: Windows as MS's only first class citizen and everyone else travelling third class on the roof.

Phase 2 -> Phase 3 transition

What shocks me..

is that all of you smart guys know what Microsoft strategy is (to make sure everybody is bound to the Microsoft stack) yet nobody of you people here stands up for alternatives when push comes to shove.

Each time you get an assignment to program something that will have an impact on social services like water supply, energy, transportation or defense, your first response should be to use open source software. Not that you should have anything against Microsoft specifically, they are not the disease, but merely a very visible symptom of a broken market.

Sounds very Stallmanian, I agree, but if you want to make sure your client gets a secure, stable and maintainable product, than the choice is obvious. Change starts when people actually behave differently.

The Nuremberg defense: "but I have a deadline" does not fly. Your marketing department should be quite capable in proving why MS technology is a bad choice for your client.

But I guess it's the x*10^6 of dollars we receive each year from Microsoft that persuades us not to do our jobs and disobey our engineers vow to protect the public...

(For the people that don't remember: "Engineers shall hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public." http://www.nspe.org/Ethics/CodeofEthics/index.html )

So what's new?

I.e. just the same as the old ActiveX. Click here to let this program have total access to your computer, or the application you want to run won't work.

And exactly the same problems. No way to know if it's malware. No way to know if it's got security holes because the author wasn't thinking about security when he wrote it but only about functionality. No way to know if the company that wrote it assumed that it was perfectly legitimate for them to have it send them all your data without telling you.

Boss: Nope, can't have that. It must work OOTB based on their standard deployment, which is IE6 by the way, and we can't demand they install anything else.

Me: Err...crap.

This is what we have to live with. It *MUST* run in IE6 and if it needs to use anything more than a PDF plug-in, you're S.O.L. I'd love it if customers would use a proper browser (even IE7 would do) but it just doesn't happen. I know people who are still rolling out XP with that abomination IE6!

Eventually

They'll drop it, but not for a good decade of flogging that dead horse.

Not having developed with it yet, I can't say whether it's any good, but for me, it is yet another bolt on for your browser, and since the flash platform, which of course devoured shockwave, is quite apply cruising along, why rock the apple cart?

I am sure that whatever I may be able to do with silverlight I can most likely do with a bit of AS3, some flex and flash build and a tickle of javascript - something else MS tried to tamper and gave up with.

@The BigYin

Thanks for sharing. Yes that's a common situation. It's also an ironical one. Since they have to put in these "requirements" because of vendor lockin. Which is something they want to prevent... and round and round the circle goes.

So if a customer is serious about getting rid of vendor lockin, then they will listen to the arguments.

Given the situation you describe, your boss will listen if you find customers that would want an application based on open source or don't care about the plugin install.